Illumio
Cybersecurity company boosts market leadership with ViB Research
Increased awareness & demand for company product
Positioned company as a marketing leader
Built an integrated campaign and content library
Overview
Mandy Skroupa has been in cybersecurity for her entire career. She joined cloud security company Illumio, Inc. in 2019 as Chief of Staff to the CMO. Now serving as their Marketing Programs Manager, Mandy oversees go-to-market motions such as webinars, content, and email marketing.
To support her goal of driving inquiries and Marketing Qualified Leads, or MQLs, for the marketing team, Mandy sought ways to position Illumio as a market leader, grow awareness for the company’s Illumio Core® and Illumio Edge® products, and attract new audiences to partner with on their journey to better security.
Mandy Skroupa
Marketing Programs Manager, Illumio
“We were able to take ViB’s survey results and create a great report. That report has so much life to it — creating blogs, doing a webinar, getting other outlets to pick it up, putting it into social channels and into content syndication, and getting those survey results into the market in digestible ways — and delivered great benefits to us.”
ViB Solution
Mandy’s predecessor at Illumio leveraged ViB’s Research solution to conduct several surveys that Illumio used to build demand-generating, industry leading market reports.
The ViB team had worked closely with Illumio to fine-tune the survey questions and identify the targeted respondents, to ensure they received the insights they were looking for. Once the survey was launched, it took about six weeks to deliver the results. Those results were used to create Illumio’s first State of the Security Segmentation report and other content to use in content syndication and repurpose across demand generation channels.
Mandy found the prior ViB survey methodology and results to be credible “not just within the marketing world but to external publishers as well.” Because the survey data and the resulting assets were so valuable, the successful relationship with ViB was one that Mandy wanted to continue.
From a cost standpoint, Mandy found ViB to be very competitive. In addition to being affordable, the fact that ViB “had already delivered positive results for us” was a key deciding factor in her choice to renew the ViB Research program.
“People always want to know what other people are thinking,” Mandy says. “Anytime you can loop in high-quality independent survey results, the material you create will carry more weight.”
Dramatic Results
When you commission a survey, “you don’t know what the results are going to be,” says Mandy, which can make it difficult to plan activities around survey results in advance. Typically “there is a lot of digesting that does need to happen once the results come in.” But with ViB, it was easy to “craft a really good story based on the results we received.”
Illumio’s product marketing team was able to build a new report from the ViB survey results, Security Risks 2021: Ransomware and the Return to the Office. “One good indicator” of a great report “is that our PR agency considered it newsworthy,” she says. “They won’t pick up everything so having a press release for the report was a pretty good start.”
Momentum quickly grew. Soon, Illumio’s communications team “saw an uptick of six or seven different publications that also were citing our report in their articles.” The next step for Illumio’s communications and product marketing team was to work together to “create about eight different blog posts that were different variations” on the report.
Because conversions are “number one” when it comes to marketing metrics, the high number of “people downloading the asset” was really important. Moreover, her team was able to use the report as their main content pillar and build different activities around it to increase awareness and drive demand. For Mandy, “this particular asset is a good example of the starting point for an integrated campaign.”
“You don’t just put one asset out there and say, now we’re done,” she says. “Instead, we looked at this report as a key part of an integrated campaign” including the press release, blogs, and a webinar.
ViB’s Research solution helped Mandy and her team take thought leadership into their own hands, and position Illumio as a market leader in security. It also helped grow awareness for products beyond their core offering. “Having content that links to a wider range of Illumio® products is really important as we find the right angles to attract new audiences.”
Without VIB, “the simple answer is that we wouldn’t have had any of the coverage in business publications, our blogs, paid social promotions, and content syndication material” to build a campaign around. “It would have been a huge miss,” she says.
ViB is “very wonderful to work with,” according to Mandy, including the fact that ViB stayed on the promised schedule. “We had to pick a report deliverability date to give to the PR team — and we had to deliver.” ViB made it happen.
The level of collaboration Mandy received from ViB to “make sure we put out the right questions” was also beneficial and delivered strong results. “Being a smaller company, a great partnership with a vendor like ViB is very positive and something we appreciate. We can count on them to help us move our business forward.” Not only is the survey data “just invaluable — but the way ViB handles all the logistics of collecting that information is a huge help for us.”
